The art and artifice of early sports photography

Abstract

The rise of modern sport in the mid-nineteenth century coincided with the emergence of photography as a new image-making medium. Thus, both practices developed in parallel. Notably, many early photographers turned to sport as a subject for their work, despite the early technological limitations of the medium. Histories of photography have, however, tended to overlook this. Similarly, sport historians have tended to regard these early photographs simply as illustrative material rather than important innovations in the formation of new visual conventions for the representation of sport. This paper seeks to redress this by exploring, in close detail, examples of sports photography produced in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. More importantly, it examines the visual vocabularies deployed by these early photographers within the context of contemporary art practices, demonstrating how artistry and artifice were deployed in the production of some of the earliest, and finest, examples of sports photography ever produced.

Notes

1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2005/09_september/05/painting.shtml.

2. Amongst the works most widely discussed by contemporary critics were: William Etty’s Diana and Endymion; Daniel Maclise’s Robin Hood and his Merry Men Entertaining Richard the Lionheart in Sherwood Forest; and Turner’s Ancient Rome, Agrippina Landing with the Ashes of Germanicus and Pluto Carrying off Proserpine.

3. Earlier races, referred to as the Liverpool Grand Steeplechase, had been staged at Aintree between 1836 and 1838. See Pinfold (1998).

4. The loose attribution to ‘Sawyer’ is based on the inscription ‘Sawyers Collection’ on an early print dated 1875 in the collection of the photograph archive of the University of St Andrews.

5. For more on Notman’s composite works see, Triggs (2005).

6. An extensive number of Notman’s photographs can be accessed via the McCord Museum online archive at www.musee-mccord.qc.ca, accessed 15 March 2016.

7. For example, in 1900 the French sporting periodical La Vie au grand air published two of Notman’s studio staged bobsleigh photographs alongside a composite representing an ice hockey match in Montreal to accompany an article reporting on winter sports. See Lange (1900).

8. For a fuller account of the history of early photo-illustrated sports journals see O’Mahony (Forthcoming).